Such conversations come up around every inaugural, which are, among other things, showcases for a president's acuity with words. Think of John F. Kennedy, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winner, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with his stirring declaration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Obama, however, is different: I've long thought of him as the writer's president. His 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father" — published, unlike JFK's "Profiles in Courage," before the start of its author's political career — is perhaps the most open book I've ever read by a national leader, establishing Obama in three dimensions, as a complex, and even contradictory, human being.

We're not accustomed to seeing such vulnerability from our presidents, but this is what makes Obama transformational in so many ways. And yet, it sets a high bar for him any time he has to make a statement that is supposed to move us, that is less about policy than rhetoric.